by Anne Holt
Her voice assailed his eardrums.
“… that it’s Christmas Eve! Have you ever not known where your sister was on Christmas Eve? What? Have you? ”
Carl-Christian began to cry. He wept like a small boy no longer bothered that his friends could see him; he sobbed noisily and dipped his head. The foam became too wet and ran in tiny rivulets down his scrawny chest.
“I’m so …”
He couldn’t speak. Mabelle put an arm around his shoulders, turning him toward her, and wiped the shaving foam with the back of her hand as she murmured reassuring insignificant words. In the end she held him close, hugging him to her body, caressing his head and rocking him slowly from side to side.
“I’m so scared that something’s happened to Hermine as well,” Carl-Christian sobbed into her shoulder.
“I know that,” Mabelle said, stroking his wet hair. “We’re both scared. But now you have to listen to me. Then everything will be okay. The two of us, we only have each other, you know.”
“And Hermine,” he gasped.
Mabelle did not respond. She embraced Carl-Christian as hard as she could, and met her own gaze in the mirror over his shoulder. She did not look away. By keeping a tight grip on herself she could steer Carl-Christian. She must assume control. There was no one to turn to; no one would help any of them.
She would keep hold of him for as long as necessary.
The prostitutes never turned up. Mary had delayed dinner by an hour and a half and phoned four different cellphone numbers without obtaining any answer anywhere. In the end she had heaved a deep sigh and kept up a continuous litany of complaint, as if it had been her own children who had let her down. Her mood improved when all the others were seated at the table, wide-eyed, and the food was praised resoundingly.
By around nine o’clock the spacious living room was an absolute riot of Christmas wrapping paper and snacks, half-filled glasses and soft-drink bottles, games, clothes, and books. Mary had unwillingly agreed to turn off all the power-operated decorations before they ate. Now the children were pestering to have them switched on again, but Mary had succumbed to a bribe of a carton of cigarettes and insisted that Father Christmas in the corner had gone to sleep for the night. He was tired out, you see, and they ought to allow him a little break from all the commotion. Billy T. crawled around the floor with Jenny on his back. The four-year-old, dressed in a far-too-large pair of bright-red pajamas, was waving a Barbie doll about.
“Present from Daddy,” she yelled in delight, kissing the Muslim Barbie’s burka.
Billy T. bumped past Hanne’s chair while trying to make camel noises. The look he gave her was brimming with gratitude. Hanne merely smiled and shrugged slightly. She had checked the contents of the bag he had brought last Sunday. As she thought, it had contained no gifts from Billy T. to his wife and daughter. Probably he had shelled out all his money on presents for his sons. Hanne had bought an Afghani Barbie and a miniature doll’s house for the little girl, and a deep-red cashmere sweater for Tone-Marit. To crown it all, she had tricked Billy T. out to the bathroom during the commotion before dinner and made him write gift cards in his own handwriting, to avoid being exposed.
Håkon and Karen’s children were busy assembling a racetrack. Håkon, slightly tipsy, was sitting rosy-cheeked on the settee with his son’s Game Boy, while Karen, Tone-Marit, and Mary played Scrabble at the newly cleared dining table.
“You can’t write that,” Karen said, laughing. “‘Gooday’ … it should be ‘good day’. Two words, and not written like that.”
“Do you say ‘good day’?” Mary asked peevishly, creating a dramatic pause between the words, with an emphasis on the “d” in good. “Does anybody say it like that?”
“No, but—”
“Let her write ‘gooday’,” Tone-Marit said. “We can surely have slightly different rules for Mary.”
“Different rules, no!”
Furious, Mary threw the letters away.
“I don’t need different rules, you know! I don’t want special treatment, no I don’t!”
“Scrabble might not be quite the best game for you,” Hanne said. “Shall we go and do the washing-up, you and I?”
The doorbell rang.
At first no one really paid any attention. Then Tone-Marit looked in surprise at Nefis. Karen inclined her head.
“Are you expecting someone? Now?”
She glanced at the clock.
“No,” Nefis said, taken aback.
“I’m not working at the moment,” Mary said.
She had mixed herself a drink of cola, mineral water, Fanta, apple juice, and blackcurrant cordial and had decorated the glass with a red-and-yellow paper parasol and a little Christmas elf impaled on a straw. The children were jumping around her demanding ones exactly the same.
“Somebody else will have to open the door.”
Nefis went. Thirty seconds later, she returned wearing a puzzled expression.
“It’s for you, Hanna.”
“Me? Who is it?”
“A … a boy. A young man. Come on.”
Hanne ran her fingers through her hair as she headed for the hallway.
The boy was about sixteen years of age, lightly dressed, with no cap or scarf. His jeans were painfully tight, and underneath his denim jacket he was wearing only a white T-shirt. He looked up ever so slightly when Hanne tentatively held out her hand and said: “Hi. Who are you?”
He was good-looking, with an oval face and straight nose. His eyes were blue, Hanne could see, and she suddenly felt dizzy: they were dark blue with a distinctive black circle around the iris. His hair was brown, shining, and recently cut.
“You’re Hanne,” the boy said without taking her hand, and a fleeting smile made his mouth curl inconspicuously, a crooked smile, and Hanne stared in disbelief at this mirror image of herself when she was young. “Hi.”
“Come in,” she said, stepping back.
The boy did not move. Only now did Hanne notice that he had a brown canvas duffel bag with him; the sleeve of a sweater was bulging limply between the laces. A cardboard box sat beside the bag.
“I don’t know whether …” the boy ventured, and gulped. “I—”
“You must be … is it you, Alexander?”
His eyes filled with tears. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and once again he lowered his gaze. His lashes were dark, with an odd curl that made them seem longer than they really were. Hanne’s lashes were like that. Hanne had the same mouth as this boy. Even the way he tried to feign indifference, one foot placed lightly in front of the other, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether to come or go, was Hanne’s gesture, Hanne’s movement.
The boy barely nodded.
“They’ve thrown me out,” he whispered. “They’ve bloody thrown me out. On Christmas Eve, of all days. I didn’t know where to go. You’re not in the phone book, but I remembered the name of your lady friend.”
He gave a half glance at Nefis, who was struggling to keep curious children out of the hallway.
“From the announcement. When you got married. I cut it out.”
Strangely enough, she understood all of it, all of a sudden and with the greatest clarity. This had happened before. Not in the same way, not by the same people, but for the same reason and with exactly the same result.
“Come in, Alexander,” she said, making an effort to keep her voice steady before turning abruptly to Nefis, who stood surrounded by children in the living-room doorway. “Can you leave us by ourselves for a while, do you think?”
The boy still stood outside on the landing. Hanne put her hand on his arm, feeling how narrow it was, how thin the boy was, and he let himself be led into the apartment. She picked up his luggage and placed it in a corner, before closing the door behind him. He leaned his shoulder against the door frame, turning away slightly, as if he still had plans to leave. Now he was crying soundlessly, still struggling to appear nonchalant, with his chin pressed on his ches
t and his hands deep inside his pockets.
“Look at me,” Hanne said, lifting his face carefully.
He was so unfinished: his nose a bit too large and his neck too narrow. His forehead was smooth and bare. He tried to pull his hair forward to hide his eyes.
“Now you’re going to come in with me, okay? It’s a slightly weird gathering of people …” She beamed and continued: “But we’d really, really like to have you here with us.”
The same smile appeared, obscure and crooked, and he was no longer crying. He took a deep breath and dried his eyes with the back of his hand, in a pseudo-manly gesture that ended with him getting snot on his fingers and wiping it on his trouser leg.
“I’m not exactly dressed for a Christmas visit,” he mumbled, but followed her in to meet the others.
“This is Alexander,” Hanne said in a loud voice. “My brother’s youngest son. He’s had quite a serious … argument with his parents. So now he’s going to stay here with us.”
The boy looked doubtful. His eyes scanned the assembled company and stopped at the power-operated Santa Claus. Mary muttered curses into the glass filled with her newly concocted drink, which the children were also slurping from huge, half-liter mugs.
“That’s lovely,” Nefis said blithely. “Great to have a man about the house!”
“I want to move here, too,” Hans Wilhelm, aged nine, complained. “Why can’t I get to stay here?”
“No, you’re bloody not,” Håkon slurred, quite drunk now. “I’d die of sorrow if you left me. You’re going to live with your mum and me until you’re forty at least.”
“Alexander is … How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” he said softly. “I’ll be sixteen in a month’s time.”
“Sixteen in four weeks,” Hanne repeated loudly.
“He looks amazingly like you,” little Liv said skeptically, prodding Alexander’s thigh with a stubby finger, as if she wanted to check he was real.
“Incredible,” Karen whispered to Tone-Marit. “Well, I never!”
Billy T. slapped Alexander between the shoulder blades.
“Want to help me in the kitchen? It’s the boys’ turn. My pal over there’s pissed and totally out of the game.”
The boy nodded, smiling now more broadly, exposing his teeth, and Nefis burst out laughing when she saw that one of his front teeth was slightly in front of the other, just like Hanne – the same tooth, the same peculiar angle.
“I’ll phone your parents,” Hanne whispered in the boy’s ear as he made to follow Billy T. out into the kitchen.
He stiffened.
“Take it easy,” she said quietly. “I just don’t want to have any trouble with the child welfare service, okay? I’ll deal with it all myself.”
Jenny had fallen asleep on her mother’s lap, in her red pajamas and with Mickey Mouse ears on her head. Hans Wilhelm was playing with the racetrack. Liv was standing in the kitchen mixing fresh drinks with Mary. This time they were experimenting with a mixture of milk, apple juice, and tonic water in tall glasses with peanuts at the bottom. Håkon had vanished into the bathroom, where he had apparently fallen asleep. The others were sitting in the living room chatting, with voices lowered to avoid waking the sleeping four-year-old.
Hanne experienced an astonishing sense of wellbeing. It felt liberating, from a purely physical point of view, as if she had gone for a long, strenuous walk and could at last completely relax.
“What has actually happened?” Karen asked cautiously.
“Happened?”
Hanne found a more comfortable position on the settee and put her feet under Nefis’s thigh.
“What has happened is that I’ve had the most brilliant Christmas Eve of my whole life. And in a way, of course, I’ve received an extra-special gift. A sort of child. That’s what you wanted, after all, Nefis. A child.”
For some reason Nefis was no longer smiling. She raised her glass to her mouth, something Liv had put down there, tomato juice and apple crush, and took a long drink, as if to hide her face.
“And now I’ll call my brother and tell him he’s a homophobic idiot,” Hanne said, so pleased with herself that she did not think to speculate why Nefis had almost entirely stopped touching alcohol.
Christmas Eve was over, and the guests had headed home long ago. Alexander had gone to sleep early. He had said very little. It could wait. His parents knew where he was, anyway. Everything else could stay on hold; it was the school holidays and Hanne felt happy that the boy could stay for a week or so in any case, perhaps longer. She had studied him all evening, discreetly, following his hand when he lifted his glass to his mouth, watching his fingers curl the way hers did, with the index finger curved into the palm.
She could not sleep, even though it was almost half past one.
Through the west-facing window, partly hidden behind the roller blinds, she stood watching as light after light was switched off in living rooms and bedrooms in the neighboring houses. She was surprised to feel a contented excitement, a restless sense of belonging. Shuddering, she drew her dressing gown more snugly around her frame. Her breath formed transitory clouds on the cold surface of the glass.
She couldn’t sleep and she didn’t want to work.
Once again the skin on her lower arm contracted. Nevertheless she continued to stand in the almost indiscernible draft.
It crossed her mind that she didn’t want to go to work, and that was something she had never felt before.
There was so much that she had never wanted: situations and people she had withdrawn from. But never her job. Police headquarters in Grønlandsleiret had always been Hanne’s place of refuge. Only when Cecilie had died, and it proved no longer possible for her to hide, had she fled, to a convent in Italy and six months of being alone.
Now she had so much. Life was tolerable and sometimes even pleasant. Now and again she felt these glimmers of happiness, and might even take an extra day off work.
Or just a few hours.
The Stahlberg murders scared her, and she really did not want anything to do with them. She wanted to take time off. To be with Alexander, which would be like spending time by herself. Alexander is my past with some kind of future, she thought, and I don’t want to know anything about the Stahlberg case.
When the thought first struck her, she really began to shiver. Slowly she grabbed a blanket from the back of a chair behind her and draped it around her shoulders. Something made her stay by the window all the same, staring out into the subdued light from the street lamps. The shadows of the trees were stark against the wet asphalt and the wind made the street appear autumnal. The temperature was fluctuating too much at present. Yesterday snow had lain white on the ground. Tonight dead rotting leaves were floating in what was left of the dirty slush, and melted ice was streaming along the sidewalk.
“Four people,” she whispered to herself, a pale image in the glass. “Who kills four people at one time?”
No one. Not in Norway. Not in Oslo, in Hanne’s police district. Not here in a country where nearly all homicides were the tragic consequences of drunkenness and fatal quarrels.
Nonetheless, someone had done it.
Her cellphone was in her dressing-gown pocket and she dialed the number without hesitation. It rang five times and she was just about to press the Off button to avoid voicemail and try again, when she heard a slurred voice at the other end: “Hello?”
“Billy T.,” Hanne said. She realized she was speaking in a whisper, even though there was no chance of waking the others with a conversation conducted in the living room. “It’s me.”
Penetrating noises told her that his phone had been dropped on the floor.
“It’s ten to two,” he finally groaned.
“I know. Thanks for a lovely evening.”
“I’m the one who should really say that. Thank you. For everything, you know.”
“Sorry to—”
“Sorry is your middle name, Hanne. It doesn’t help muc
h to keep saying sorry all the time. Tell me instead why you’re phoning.”
It sounded as though he was sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Shouldn’t you go into another room?” Hanne asked him.
“I’m sleeping in the boys’ bedroom. On my own. Tone-Marit complains about me snoring when I’ve had a drop or two to drink. Why are you phoning?”
“I just want to try out a line of thinking.”
“Okay, then. It’s two o’clock on Christmas morning. Fire away.”
“Why do we commit murder, Billy T.?”
“Eh?”
Her eyes had caught a movement below in the street. Something dark had disappeared under one of the trees, beside the trunk. For a moment she had been concentrating on the conversation and had not quite taken in what it was.
“Are you there?” Billy T. asked.
“Yes. Who commits murder here in this country, and why?”
“My God, Hanne—”
“Just answer me, Billy T.”
“We both know,” he said impatiently. “ Bloody hell, what is this?”
“Please. Stay with me for a moment or two.”
He sighed so loudly that the line crackled.
“Murder is committed mainly in anger,” he began, sounding magisterial. “By perpetrators who neither previously nor subsequently commit the same crime. The act is usually performed under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicating substances, and the perpetrator and victim are often related or acquainted in some other way.”
“Exactly,” Hanne said, squinting at the point where she thought she had spotted something, underneath the largest oak tree. “Far from exciting stuff, in other words. Sad, but not exciting. You said it’s often like that. Otherwise, then?”
“Sexual crimes,” Billy T. continued. “Where the murder either takes place as part of a sexual act or, more often, is committed almost by accident or to conceal an attack.”
“Thanks. But what about premeditated killings, then?”
“Hate, revenge, or money. But there aren’t as many of—”
“Hate, revenge, money or … one more thing.”
